figure of the Saviour on the cross adopting, so it appears to us, the idea of the victory of the spiritual, not as in the former case the death of the body. And this unquestionably nobler conception asserts itself at an early date in the more favoured parts of Western Europe[333]." With this sketch I must here rest content. (_b_) We have, however, _secondly_, another characteristic of art to consider in the earlier development of Italian painting. Apart from the religious content of the Old and New Testament and the biographies of martyrs and saints, it borrows its subjects in the main from Greek mythology, very seldom, that is, from the events of national history, or, if we except portraits, from the reality of contemporary life, and equally rarely, and only at a late stage and exceptionally, from natural landscape. Now that which it before all contributes to its conception and artistic elaboration of the subject-matter of religion is the _vital reality_ of spiritual and corporeal existence, relatively to which at this stage all its forms are embodied and endowed with animation. For this vitality the essential principle on the spiritual side is that natural delightfulness, and on the corporeal side is that beauty which is consonant with physical form, a beauty which independently, as beautiful form, already displays innocence, buoyancy, maidenhood, natural grace of temperament, nobility, imagination, and a loving soul. If there is further added to a _naturel_ of this type the exaltation and adornment of the soul in virtue of the ideal intimacy of religion and the spiritual characteristics of a profounder piety established as a vitalizing principle of soul-life in this essentially more admitted and inviolable province of spiritual redemption[334],--in such a case we have presented to us thereby an original harmony of form and its expression, which, wherever it is perfected, vividly reminds us in this sphere of romantic art and Christian art of the pure Ideal of art. No doubt also within a new accord of this type the inward life of the heart will be predominant; but this inward experience is a more happy, a purer heaven of the soul, the way of return to which form what is sensuous and finite, and the return to God, albeit the passage may be through a travail in the profounder anguish of repentance and death, is, however, less saturated with trouble and its insistency. And the reason of this is that the pain is concentrated in the sphere of soul, of idea, of faith, without making a descent into the region of passionate desire, intractable savagery, obstinate self-seeking and sin, and only arriving at the hardly won victory through smiting down such enemies of the blessed state. It is rather a transition of ideal permanence[335], a pain of the inward life, which feels itself as such suffering rather simply in virtue of its enthusiasm, a suffering of more abstract type, more spiritually abundant, which has as little need to brush away bodily